Mary Karr's Memoir 'The Liars' Club

A secret is something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others. In other words, it is usually a piece of information that is only known by one person or a few people. Many individuals are able to hide their secrets, however many eventually end up revealing them. But how do people behave before and after they reveal a secret? In Mary Karr’s memoir “The Liars’ Club”, the author greatly demonstrates this through Mary and her mother Charlie. Karr suggests that keeping a secret leads to silence and madness, as where love and forgiveness is caused by the revelation of a secret.
Throughout Karr’s memoir, many horrific events occur to Mary, yet not once does she tell anybody about them. One of the most graphic passages in The

Towards the end of the book, it is understood that Charlie has been actually keeping a secret from everybody, the secret being that her first ex-husband has taken her two first-born children Tex and Belinda away. This event led to Charlie’s abusive madness. It was on Mary’s birthday that one of her first breakouts occurred. “Mother is shouting, shouting she wished herself dead before she’d ever married Daddy [. . .] Then out of all the darkness I see Mother’s white hands rising from her lap [. . .] She’s reaching over for the steering wheel, locking onto it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She’s trying to take us over the edge” (138). But the madness does not stop there. One day, when the narrator comes back from school, her mother has a mental breakdown where she destroys mirrors and light bulbs in her house, throws her kids furniture into a fire and nearly kills both Mary and her sister with a butcher knife. “… she draws our clothes—culottes and sunsuits with shoulder ties and old pajamas with beading on the feet [. . .] Now it swirls from her hand in a circle and settles in the fire almost gently where it’s eaten in a quick gulp.” [. . .] At some point the fire fades to orange background, and I stare only at Mother’s face. It’s all streaked up with lipstick and soot,

When a secret is divulged, it is followed by positive or negative outcomes. In the last chapter of The Liars’ Club, Mary discovers the real reason for her mother’s madness. At that moment until the drive back to their house, everything appeared to be dark and sad. “The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t. Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both, in a way” (320). But in reality, this revelation was the begging to a brighter future. Not only do Mary and Charlie develop a greater connection with each other, Charlie ends up meeting her long lost children. According to the author, “… it marked a time when our house began to fill with uncharacteristic light” (318). So the revelation of Charlie’s secret allows Karr to add more light into the memoir since darkness and misfortunes is all that is depicted from the entire book. Also, Karr uses fireflies and poison to symbolize the family’s strength. “How odd, I thought, that those bugs lived through the refinery poisons” (320). The Karr family could be compared to those bugs surviving industrial poison, as where the poison could be seen as the family conflicts. As much as darkness surrounds them, there is still light. Therefore, even though these two individuals have gone through a lot, the mother and daughter showed forgiving behaviour. By telling the truth, they were able to heal from all the guilt and misery that happened and they